By AIMEE LEE BALL

June 21, 2013

There was a crucial moment in the life of Kelly Williams Brown when she realized that she had not made the necessary leap into adulthood: she was moving into a new apartment, and her furniture, made of particleboard, disintegrated in the rain.

Putting this memory behind her, Ms. Brown, a 28-year-old advertising copywriter in Portland, Ore., has set out to become a kind of Dear Abby/Martha Stewart/Yoda for millennials.

Her new book, “Adulting: How to Become a Grown-up in 468 Easy (ish) Steps” (Grand Central Publishing), is meant to help her peers navigate the rocky shoals of maturity, to guide those 20-somethings who are just figuring out that radio silence is not an acceptable breakup technique, and food does not spontaneously manifest itself in the refrigerator.

“One of the most jolting days of adulthood comes the first time you run out of toilet paper,” Ms. Brown said. “Toilet paper, up until this point, always just existed.”

The idea for “Adulting” (which has just been optioned for television by J. J. Abrams, executive producer of the “Lost” series) was refined when Ms. Brown worked as a reporter for the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., consulting her Facebook friends for a column about what skills or possessions they should have by the age of 30.

Those ad hoc advisers inform the book, along with what the author calls “wise random strangers at bars” and a retinue of “experts”: grief counselors, auto mechanics, etiquette savants, her parents and a surgeon who tells patients (in step No. 274), “I’d almost rather they use heroin with clean needles than smoke.”

Ms. Brown’s memories of her own moving day led to No. 51: “Don’t put big sturdy things in with little breakable things because it’s the inanimate version of Lennie and the puppy in ‘Of Mice and Men.’ ”

But her counsel bounces around many personal and professional issues, from career (No. 176: “Do not steal more than $3 worth of office supplies per quarter”) to condolences (No. 411: “If someone invites you to a funeral, you need to have a really compelling reason to skip it”) to cooking (No. 74: “Oatmeal gives you an amazing amount of energy, like cocaine, if cocaine were really good for your digestion and didn’t ruin lives”).

Despite her own admirable deportment (shiny ginger hair and no evidence of the disintegrating mascara that she calls “failure flakes”), Ms. Brown mostly stays clear of fashion or beauty concerns. “There are vast industries telling young women what to wear and how to look,” she said. But (No. 252) “If you’re going to wear white, you must commit to it” — meaning no mustard, tomato sauce or Sharpies. “This also goes for baby blue, baby pink, spring green: basically any color that would be at home for an Easter service.”

Some serious issues are tackled, including realistic references to exigencies created by the current economy, from moving back with Mom and Dad (No. 452: “Do nonmonetary things to help out”) to joblessness (No. 3: “Don’t get hurt when the world doesn’t care about you. You graduate law school with glorious visions of the important work you’ll do for the Southern Poverty Law Center, but find yourself photocopying briefs”).

One situation that ended up on the cutting-room floor was how to help a friend having an abortion. “I have encountered it multiple times,” she said, “but it was a little too close to the bone, and I didn’t want to blindside people.”

Most things that seem like an emergency or a disaster at age 21 are not, in fact, an emergency or a disaster, according to Ms. Brown (that’s No. 390), and she suggests that freaking out is not the appropriate response to car trouble, wardrobe malfunctions, cats ingesting hairballs or anything involving fingernails.

Not that she doesn’t sympathize. “The thing that usually causes me anguish isn’t ‘My friends are getting married and I’m not,’ ” she said. “It’s opening my crisper drawer, which smells foul because I was thinking, optimistically, that I would learn to cook kale, and instead I have a vegetal slurry.”

Along with her convictions, Ms. Brown is not without contradictions: Step No. 83 is “Make a dope cheese plate” (she sometimes reverts to the vernacular of a “Girls” episode), but step No. 275 is “Anything that tastes really good — think twice about.” On the subject of office romances, she’s stern (No. 163: “Live your life as though everyone in the office has plastic, featureless doll crotches”) but forgiving (No. 162: “Having a poorly considered liaison with a co-worker is the chickenpox of the working life, so you may as well get it over with”).

You will not catch her standing outside Tiffany & Co. like Audrey Hepburn (No. 204: “If you don’t have money to shop, do not window-shop as if that’s a real thing”), but she admits that “lots of times, Comcast has to call and ask nicely, then not nicely, for me to pay my cable bill.”

Ms. Brown now lives with real furniture (and a boyfriend), although her pantry still includes “one responsible choice of cereal and one that says ‘I’m a 7-year-old’ .” (This from a section of the book called “Procuring Food So You Don’t Die.”)

Before she went to Los Angeles for meetings with producers, she said, “there was a lot of trying on various outfits and then sending pictures to every single person I know for critical feedback.”

A family friend eased her nerves. “She was talking about times when you get invited to a party that is way above your fanciness pay grade. Her advice was to act like you’ve been there before and remember that you all arrived on the same guest list. So I did my best to be calm, to be myself and pretend that I was not about to die at any moment of excitement and anxiety.”

The option deal will certainly help fatten her 401(k), a concept that Ms. Brown hopes her contemporaries will embrace. Adults-in-training can trick themselves into contributing, with techniques like freezing their credit cards (No. 206: yes, literally encasing them in ice) to avoid spending beyond their means.

“I still don’t feel like I’m an adult all the time,” she said, “but I’m not writing to exorcise my demons. I want people to have some useful information, and I don’t want them to feel less-than. These ideas are not moral judgments.”

Indeed, part of her impetus in writing “Adulting” was to defend millennials against their reputation for being entitled and self-absorbed.

“The people I know in my age group are not aimless man-child caricatures,” Ms. Brown said. “They don’t spend the bulk of their time Instagramming brunch entrees. They, like every generation, sometimes struggle and sometimes succeed in the complicated process of becoming an adult. Millennials can be a little narcissistic, although I don’t think there’s anything weird about our collective character. We’re coming of age in a time that’s tough. But far be it from me to deny the older generation the pleasure of complaining about the younger.”